[Music] respect is something more than aretha franklin sang about it's something we're all demanding these days but can we ever feel respected until we can learn to respect others i sat down with documentary filmmaker former u.s ambassador to the bahamas and philanthropist nicole avant to discuss the importance of showing respect this is a bit of optimism [Music] it really is such a pleasure to meet you i've heard so many wonderful things about you from some of our mutual friends i know i've heard the same and it's it's about time that we've met i know i
know and i think it's funny that we're meeting for the first time like this like on a on a podcast of course very okay wrong i i won most talkative in the eighth grade for a reason is that a good idea to tell kids what they're the most of when they're young like is that it from now on from the eighth grade that's your identity you're the most talkative kid i know it's not very good it's funny my dad was not happy he said oh that means you're talking too much in class that means you're
doing this and he took it very in the negative and my teacher said no we we gave it to her because she can converse with anyone she converses with the athlete she converses with the nerds she talks to the science nerd so in that way i thought oh i like that i'll take that so technically most conversant yes and it actually gave me uh when my teacher said that it gave me a sense of oh right i can't talk to anybody which which then gave me a responsibility of trying to find the common good in
people so it actually turned out to be a good thing you know i was very similar i wasn't sort of in a clique i was friends i guess if you really had to force me into one i was probably in the nerds but i was friends with everybody i mean my friends in the theater crowd and i had friends who were jobs and that sort of ability to go between tribes has served me for my entire life me too and that's a really beautiful way to put it which is because we are tribal as humans
and to be able to navigate through each tribe and learn something about someone in each tribe helps you break down barriers i think i mean it served me for that purpose in my life and how i moved forward in my life i always thought oh i understand that person yeah well i know what that person's feeling only because i had played in their sandbox for lack of a better term of i just went to their sandbox for a minute and understood kind of how they behave and what they think and what they believe and even
if it wasn't really aligned with me or i didn't have a lot in common at least i could say oh i've been there this is interesting i think that the solutions we find to the challenges we have when we're kids become our strengths as adults 100 one of the reason clicks and tribes exist is they give those in the tribe a sense of belonging and psychological safety um and and it helps give us an identity right it helps us define who we are and so what's your identity if you're not if you're a member of
no tribe because you can understand them and be with them but you're not really love them and then you go to the next one and you can understand with them so for your ability to go between the tribes and understand yes it served you well and it served you in your career and your life but then the raises the interesting question where do you belong i always knew one thing that wherever i go you know because i try to tell my kids this wherever you go there you are so you need to at least like
yourself and i remember thinking for some reason i knew at a very young age my purpose was to heal through inspiration i don't know where i got that from i don't know if it was me moving in and out of different pods or groups of tribes or something like that i think i created my identity out of being able to move around so much and really realizing i can be a connector of people and that's really all i saw growing up people always ask me which what's your what's my purpose how do i find my
purpose i think everybody's purpose is to search before we're operating at our best yes exactly if we're operating that's the only deal i think what's happening with a lot of younger generations is that they've been not given the opportunity to develop a muscle of resilience and you've got to go through ups and downs and highs and lows and you have to figure out things and start over again start stop start stop and learn and when you cuddle people too much any human being i'm not judging anybody thank god i mean i thank my mom now
every day for making me do things that i was not comfortable doing making me finish things that i didn't like you know i didn't like the violin after five times my mom said well you've got six more weeks and then you don't have to do it again but you have to finish i couldn't quit my lessons until i just finished it's a muscle that i've developed over time that thank god that has allowed me to really look at the reality and give me perspective on things you talk about sort of the over cuddled and much
has been written about this and uh you know you and i are not the first to talk about this for sure this generation of young people who experienced september 11th and then went on to have kids and there was this real fear for our children for a new parent uh in that generation and the theory is you know became unbelievably overprotective and is there an entire generation of kids now growing up without the grit necessary to really thrive in life and we see we see higher rates of anxiety and depression in a younger generation i
mean you hear these stories you know it's one thing for a parent to call up and say why didn't my kid get an a at school we hear these stories of like 25 and 26 year olds of their parents calling up and saying why didn't my kid get a promotion yes and like at some point when do we let go and allow somebody to scrape their knees i was born in 1968 i am the first person in my lineage in america that was born with all my rights so it's a long time of people not
having any right and my father was born into segregation born into jim crow had everything against him and saw the most atrocious things and dealt with um atrocities that no one should experience i'm just talking about his experience this has happened around the world obviously through centuries but for me i think what's helped me is i was so proud of my history whether it was people in my family or whether it was people that i read about whether you know i always mentioned ruby bridges or ernest green who was part of the little rock nine
i'm trying to say my parents really gave me all that not to scare me and they didn't really cuddle me but it reminded me life can be both things it is great and it is beautiful and it can be tough and it can be mean and you do have to scrape your knees and people aren't always going to like you and people aren't going to treat you with respect and if you want to be great at something you have to keep practicing and someone's always going to out do you someone's going to practice more and
so i think that by not allowing a human being regardless of their child when a human fall or scrape their knee or be offended or have something rude said to them it's very detrimental to the human soul to not have a tool to respond your dad is the personification of grit yes i mean he came as you said he came with everything against him including the law and then rose up to be one of the most powerful music executives in the business at a time when there were i mean he was he was the first
of many things he did there were no black music executives i mean he he was it yes with an eighth grade education which is astonishing and was able to give you a life that was very different than the life he had very different so you could have been cuddled oh yes i could have been cuddled and i mean yes did i have nice things of course but always had a strong work ethic because i always had to work and i've done every type of job like everybody else and i've gotten fired from a few things
i didn't know what the hell i was doing but i but i tried and i worked at it yeah and i for my father it was you know figure it out that's what my dad would always say to me you're wanting this easy path where it's all smooth and some roads are paved with rocks or some roads are paved with pebbles and some roads are paved with sand you don't know when i was writing leaders eat last i was doing research into parenting and you know the question is like how do we become ourselves you
know what role do our parents play yeah and the research was pretty clear that our parents actually are not solely responsible for who we become you know our friends and our teachers and our experiences they mold us into who we are you know two parents doing the same thing and a brother and a sister turn out completely differently but the one thing that every child learns from their parents across cultures is how to treat yourself and how to treat others 100 every child gets that from your parents 100 my friends would laugh at me we'd
go to clubs when we were in college and i would always clean off the basin at a club like the worst bathrooms you could possibly find and i'd clean my hands and then here i was pulling down more uh paper towels and cleaning down the basin and my father's looking at what are you doing and i said well you have to leave it clean for the next person and they were looking at yeah but we're in a club like no one cares someone's going to vomit but it doesn't matter but it was a habit of
look out for the next person you know holding the door open for somebody i mean i remember my father yelling at me over and i was so hurt by it and i didn't do it on purpose but i wasn't paying attention and i i let the door slam on somebody coming behind us in a restaurant and you would have thought that i created the most heinous act but to my father it was pay attention there's somebody coming behind you there is a fellow human being behind you pay attention but this goes right back to the
where we started in high school which is the ability to go between groups and be considerate of the fact that there are different people who look different and sound different um and see people for who they are but it raises the question again which tribe do you find safety yeah if you're the one always thinking about other people where can you just go and somebody says it's okay you're you're one of us we're we got you like where where is that place for you where is that place for you so i definitely am a misfit
and i do well where the misfits go so i love new york because new york is the the island of los toys the island of misfit toys you know it's like and i have a test it's really funny when somebody first moves to new york you know wherever they're from and they're all starry-eyed and like i made it to new york i have i can ask them one question and 100 i'll find out if they're going to survive or not and the question is wherever you grew up you know boise or chicago like wherever you're
from were you the black sheep you know were you the ones that people like didn't really understand or and they and they would look at me like no i fit in fine i'm like you're not gonna last you're right right but if they go like you know yeah i never really fit in where i grew up you know i grew up in whatever place and i never felt like i belonged i always felt like an outsider i'm like you'll do just fine here and that's sort of a funny thing so i love hanging out with
artists they're some of my favorite people you know and and i love subcultures um and i find all these little subcultures where you know a group of people i like comic-con you know that that sort of nerdy crew all the people who are like laughed at and made fun of because they like to dress up as superman not for halloween and and all of a sudden you're amongst all the same weirdo misfits who've been made fun of their whole life so i'm good with the other misfits interesting uh now that you say that i'm i
love living in new york by the way it was the best time of my life and i actually talked to one of my best friends susannah the other day and i said i was 24 and i felt like i could i was on top of the world i felt that i was the smartest at 24. and she said because you had an unshakable faith that everything was going to work out i said i did she goes unshakable you were in new york like doesn't matter whatever happens this and that but it's funny you you ask
that question now that i think about it it's always with artists yeah and mostly musicians because that's my tribe of people that i understand the most because we could speak in silence you know i grew up around musicians i studied musicians i can sit with them all day long i understand and even if we don't say anything i could sit there for hours and i feel very safe and i can let my guard down because musicians i think and beautiful songwriters are the most vulnerable and i learned about life and i still learn about life
more through music than anything else because there are beautiful stories that allow my imagination to see the person they're talking about to feel the pain that they're talking about to feel the heartbreak to feel the joy to feel the confusion and then what musicians have always given me is a sense of not being alone that's that tribalism yeah that made me feel oh someone does know what i'm feeling i don't want to call it tribalism because tribalism has pejorative connotations that's that's the feeling of being in a tribe of finding finding your tribe yeah yes
so it begs the question then how can others find their tribe because a lot of us you know sort of go through life feeling uncomfortable or like we don't belong or like we don't fit and that's what every human being wants it's a basic human instinct we want to feel like we belong we want to belong and we want to be seen we want to be seen and we i mean basically we want to be respected seen heard and understood yeah i think respect is the highest form of love so everyone's like love your neighbor
it's really for me it's just give somebody just their basic right of respect doesn't mean they're always going to behave in the same way doesn't mean you have to like people doesn't mean any of that but at least show up with respect try to and we all fall from that from time to time but the beauty is if you have that baseline so to speak even when you're off and you miss the mark you'll know it your spirit will tell you that wasn't cool you were just so disrespectful or so rude or uncut and you
come right back and then you're able to start over because you're able to check your own spirit this is very interesting i i want to underscore this when we are disrespectful we know it and it immediately went to sort of an extreme example that i just learned very recently i i was talking to dia khan the documentarian who made a remarkable documentary called white right she is a muslim woman who was trolled by white supremacists to the point where the police told her stay away from open windows it got really dangerous wow and what she
decided to do was move to the united states and spend time trying to get to know white supremacists and giving the giving them a safe space to feel heard which is kind of a remarkable thing and and she made this documentary where she she shows it but the story that's not in the documentary that i just learned recently was a number of the white supremacists through getting to know dia dropped out of the movement because they started to trust her and view her as a friend and one of them dropped out of the movement after
they saw her documentary and he called her up and said i'm i'm leaving the movement because i saw the movie and that's not me and she said did i unfairly represent you like did i depict you as you not are is that what you say that's not me he says no no you your documentary is fine he said i'm looking at myself the way i'm speaking the way i'm acting that's not me that's not who i am so he was shown this mirror where he was displaying a lack of respect where he viewed himself as
a highly respectful and he couldn't reconcile that and so the only recourse he could find was to leave the movement but i find that so interesting and so again it's such an interesting point you make which is we know like we know when we're when we're frustrated and short-tempered and we're rude to the customer service agent on the other side of the phone yes we we know yes some of us have the wherewithal to apologize in the moment and sometimes we hang up and try and pretend that it they should have done this for me
and i'm the you know but we know we know i think that's such a fascinating thing that that that people know when they're being disrespectful and you have to we have to be able to get to the point to self-correct so how do we do that nicole how do we do that we live in a world where the the conversation is how are you treating me but the conversation is not how am i treating others exactly and i think the focus you know it's self-idolatry it's ridiculous everyone's focused on the self as opposed to looking
outward and we all belong to this one world there's only one where are we going anyway everyone's trying to get rid of everybody where are you going really where the hell are you going where do you want everyone to go there's one world and i live by the golden rule right at least that's my intention right but you are going to err and you will you may not do it on purpose but you'll lose your patience you'll be short and you'll you're going to have to reconcile with yourself and at least admit to yourself you
know what that wasn't cool when i was thinking about what i want to talk to you about you know i wanted to talk to you about how you find your tribe i wanted to talk to you about identity and belonging because your your story is such an unusual one and your experiences i i think very unique and the more we talk the more i'm learning what your perspective is it's magical actually which is i'm trying to get you to sort of talk about identity and where you come from and what your tribe is and what
i'm hearing is that you see yourself as a member of the tribe called human being yes and you express concern at this new exaggerated it's not new but it's definitely exaggerated in our time us and them right and wrong and it leads to this terrible self-righteousness and this is what i think the the sides miss which is both sides think they are right the self-righteousness is the problem i heard somebody say it's really great he said um he has to remind himself sometimes he says i look at the mirror and i say to myself there
is a throne there's somebody on it and it's not you you know and i i look at that and i think we're all attacking each other because everyone to your point thinks that they're right and their belief is the only belief their way is the only way and what that says to other people is your opinion doesn't matter your feelings don't matter you don't matter respecting you doesn't matter um honoring your soul doesn't matter and those are all lies we've seen throughout the beginning of time that societies do well when they're and that's what i
think the beauty of america is with all of its faults and everything else the reason we're still the the beacon to everybody is at least self-correct at least you turn around and you make things right and it takes a lot and i think this generation doesn't realize things take time oh that's that's that thing that your friend said about you which is you know you have this undying belief that everything will work out and this you just glow with optimism but i want to know what the first step is i agree with you i think
it can and will work out but when a group of people storm the capital and believe that they are right the next day the self-righteousness or somebody who uh spits on a racist you know at a rally the self-righteousness in that too that i feel that i i did right you know i i yelled at that person and and and i go home and feel good about myself but it did very little to anything i'll even go so far as to say nothing to move the needle solve the problem or bring humanity back together yeah
because it's never okay again going back to that basic golden rule it's never okay ever to disrespect another soul on purpose yeah we do it all the time but not on purpose to hurt someone physically emotionally spiritually is never okay so nicole avant what's the first step i think the first step is you have to see the other person as yourself how how do you do it i i honestly look at everybody like this is a human being who has the basic human rights the same exact human rights and the same 24 hours every day
that i do we are the same we belong to the same tribe we belong to the same race which is called the human race that's where i start because we live in a world right now where we're starting to see each other as lesser i know that that one group of people is undeserving of dot dot dot right and it's not true and it is a lie you have to stand on truth we're all stay everyone's standing on quicksand you have to stand on concrete it is not true though would you everyone says i i
was i was right i could spit in that person's face i could spit in that cop's face i could spit in that racist face really is it okay if they spit in your face i don't think so but really but let me play devil's advocate right yes but they've been oppressing me for years that it doesn't matter what they've been doing because an eye for an eye lose everyone blind we all know that too again the idea of being so self-righteous to say well they hurt me so i can hurt them well they did this
so i can do this no you've just become that person so what's the difference you're the same yeah now you've become them and i think your example was great that man who dropped out of the white supremacist group he didn't want to identify as that person i think for me what do i want to identify as what type of human being do i want to be to my fellow man i i asked dia how she got the courage to go spend time with white supremacists and give them a safe space to speak you know to
empty their bucket as she calls it and she said leading up to that moment it was all about them trying to convert them and convince them and put them down you know and she went to the rallies and yelled at people and had that sense of self-righteousness and she realized that she was accomplishing nothing except making herself feel better about herself right and she she said it was it was nothing about them it became about her which is she didn't go to see them to convert them or change them or convince them they were wrong
she went to see them because she it's the kind of person she wanted to be she realized that she wanted to be the person who was capable of listening and holding space and not trying to convince them that they needed to be the kind of people to listen and hold space right i think i've learned in my life and i'm sure you have the more i listen and i just let people go even if i disagree with them completely all right just let me hear you out just you know my dad was very good at
that let me just hear it out and you might get one kernel of something but the more and more people start to become more and more vulnerable and and then a solution usually comes out without you having to do anything the person changes on their own to your point this man what's so interesting what you're pointing to is that what we are doing is curating our own echo chambers where we're making our own cnns and our own fox news where we are literally excluding people from our friend group who disagree with us or don't share
our exact point of view so the only people we're surrounding ourselves with are people reinforce sometimes our worst tendencies and and the question is how do you be friends with someone that you could like i have one friend in particular that i'm thinking of who she and i are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and we have very different opinions of how the world works and should work and i remember once we were walking somewhere and we were one of us brought something up and she started to explain some of her points of view
and i think i actually said the word i definitely thought it but i think i actually said how can you be so stupid and she stopped and she didn't attack me for my argument she attacked me for calling her stupid and i realized i just called my friend stupid and completely dismissed any opinion or point of view she has and i i took the first step to destroying a friendship because i loved her and she was good to me and kind you know and we realized that we could piss each other off when we didn't
listen to each other and so i learned from that friendship instead of dismissing and walking away from the friendship i had to learn to ask her questions with curiosity as to how she came to her point of view and why that point of view matters to her with genuine desire to understand and what i learned was though we still disagree on many things we're always able to find a kernel that we can agree on exactly and find common ground when we find that kernel we become very interested in the other person's point of view to
teach us not to convert the other because if you think about it when we surround ourselves with only those who agree with us we create our own echo chambers right and that goes for almost everything we follow the people we agree with we watch the shows we agree with we listen to podcasts we agree with right and if that person says one thing we disagree with we unfollow right like i've actually had it happen where i posted something on instagram and somebody wrote in the comments i've loved your work for years i've read all your
books but i completely disagree with this i'm unfollowing you yeah when we surround ourselves only with people who agree with us we become so sensitive to anything that is dissonant right where when we learn the skill to include accept respect i love your your your word respect what we actually do is we become better friends my dad now if i go to his house if i go to my parents house he's flipping channels you know i gotta watch cnn then i gotta watch fox and i have to watch what everyone's saying you have to listen
and he will and he gave me that which is you gotta listen to what everyone's saying you want to be able to say hmm i didn't think about it that way i never thought about that oh i understand that you know try and listen even if it's polar opposite you know i think that was again going back to the civil rights movement and exactly what dr king did you know i always say he was one of the best strategists i have ever ever been inspired by he this whole idea of everyone thinks oh non-violence oh
which is love everybody this was strategic thought out process and sending people to meet gandhi in india so that they knew bring this back we need that teaching here this is going to be the ark this non-violent movement that gandhi started we can now take that and bring it to black americans here and use that that was the driving force do we think that dr king agreed with everybody he tried to make deals with all the time obviously not do you think that him and lbj just stopped there all the time and oh yeah sure
no and yet they're there they're next to each other it's back and forth and up and down and around and about and you know what but the results we got it and to underscore the movement the movement was bigger than the people and the movements take time movements take time every single founding member of the women's suffrage movement had died before the first woman voted i tell everybody i stand on very brave strong courageous shoulders now i'm sitting here on this podcast with you because there were people that didn't quit because they knew that they
were planting seeds and that one day something would sprout and they will have all these things that they are fighting for and that sprout is me and that's why i don't take my life for granted i'm one step removed from people that literally didn't have any rights at all and it takes time my grandmother her mother her mother her mother goes all the way back and beatings and lynchings imagine living a life like this of not looking up she said oh some days i just walked home from work you know which was god knows how
many miles because i didn't want to look up because i didn't want to see anybody that i knew hanging from a tree and i thought what but that was her reality at that time and she never gave up she went to try and vote god knows how many times turned away each time laughed at each time spit on each time and now for me that's why i look at people like you have no right not to get up and vote are you kidding me it doesn't matter if you believe in this get up and go
and vote for the simple reason of just somebody actually literally died for you to have this right and freedom is not free and freedom takes time and laws take time and work work it's like it's like any relationship right you talk to the best marriages and you say what's your secret they say it's it's a lot of work it's a lot of work and all of this stuff that we're talking about called humanity and society and freedom all of these things are not prizes to be won they're relationships to be managed they all require huge
amounts of work all the time you said the perfect point which is our whole reason of being on this earth is about human relationships everyone has a relationship with each other and it's imperfect and messy and human because life is messy and life is beautiful it's always an end you know and and and there's good there's bad there's ugly there's happiness there's sadness it's all together but that's what it is and there are mountains and there are valleys and i'm telling you the only time that my character has ever been tested as yours or anybody
else's it's not on top of the mountain for christ's sake it's always in the valley it's always in the weeds and in the weeds is where you grow and in the weeds is where you learn and in the weeds is where you get hurt and in the weeds is where you hurt somebody and you learn or hopefully and you grow and then when you get to the mountaintop then that's the time to pull people up and that's the time to turn around and look who else is climbing up the mountain and try to bring them
along and i think it's the human process of life here's what i've learned from you today which is to think about human society like recycling which is you know when you take something and you put it in the garbage and we literally say i'm going to throw this away where exactly is away it's like blowing the leaves from your yard onto your neighbor's yard look i've gotten rid of the leaves right and that's what we do with garbage i move it from here to there but it's still on the planet it hasn't gone anywhere right
right we've just removed it from my site is basically where we remove this garbage from my site is actually more accurate right and this is the same with people you and you said it which is where exactly do you want them to go we want to get rid of all of these people where exactly are they going to go yeah you know which is it's all on the planet yeah the thing we have to do is learn to be with each other learn to take care of each other learn to use the talents and skills
that each other have and it's not all pretty and it's not about changing them and converting them it's about who do we want to be what kind of person do i want to be and we're all so busy trying to hold on to our tribe and compare the value of my tribe to the value of your tribe and my tribe is more valuable than you're a tribe and to your point we're all a member of one tribe called the human race and we better take care of our tribe because otherwise we all live otherwise we
all lose nicole i am proud to be in your tribe with you thank you i'm so happy to be in your tribe thank you so much so great if you enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts until then take care of yourself take care of each other you
